The Bluehair Brigade

9/12/03

THE BLUEHAIR BRIGADE
Or
MAKING ENDS MEET

I’ve been worrying because the President keeps asking for more and more tens, or maybe hundreds, of billions from Congress while at the same time he keeps cutting taxes by the trillions, especially if you’re lucky enough to be rich or corporate.

So how are we going to make ends meet?

Well, it’s clear that the social nets will be plenty ragged soon----oldsters better not count on Social Security and Medicare. And it’s also clear that LOTS of children are going to get left behind by the Education President. Also, our military is stretched frighteningly thin in Iraq, and all our angry former allies aren’t about to bail us out.

So why not institute three new branches of the National Guard? First of all: A Bluehair Brigade. Now that Social Security and Medicare will be undercut by the trillion dollar tax cuts and deficits, those octogenarians who have outlived their hubbies will need to re-apply their frail shoulders to the grindstone to make ends meet. The problem is, the Bush Economy is losing jobs at a dizzying rate. The answer is unavoidable and inevitable. Drag those bluehaired tennis-shoed widder-wimmenz out of their rest homes and drum them into the WACs, or the WAVES, Alzheimer’s Army, or La Brigada de Bluehairs. We can name Barbara Bush their generalissima, and she can run the show from the combat zone or keep her headquarters in Kennebunkport if she’s feeling chickenhawkish.

Sure, once the ladies get to Baghdad they won’t be able to remember their training or their mission or even where they are or who they are or what they’re fighting for. But that’s all to the good! The Bush Administration has amnesia over ITS mission in Iraq, too.

And sure the old bluehairs will die like flies in the desert heat. But that also has its Centrum-silverlining. Because with the gigantic new taxcuts for the rich, the nation won’t be able to afford all those sweet old doddering grannies in any case. Back in the States, these coupon-clipping pensioners were a drag on the economy. So why NOT paint targets on their backs and send them within bomb’s reach of Arab terrorists? As George W says: “Bring ‘em on!” Let jihadhists thirsting for American blood pour into Iraq from all points of the compass. It’ll be a GOOD thing. The terrorists will exhaust themselves slaughtering an endless supply of American grannies, most of whom will be too dithering, despairing, and disoriented to know who or what’s blowing them up. Imagine the savings to the Social Security program as millions of bluehairs abruptly stop pulling down those fat government checks. These mercy-killings will be a win-win sitch for both sides.

And the grannies will also serve as decoys. They’ll be marching, or at least limping & gimping, around Iraq in their desert cammies and flak jackets and will look, to the Arabs, like choice American targets. It will be like Ali’s rope a dope in the Rumble in the Jungle. We’ll let the jihadhists exhaust themselves taking their best shots at what is essentially a defunct and obsolete generation. Meanwhile, we can hold our youthful crack troops in reserve. Then, in the late rounds, when the jihadhists, sated on American-granny blood, are out in the streets celebrating their victories, our young rested troops can swoop in and knock them off and make the world safe for the United States of Halliburtonia.

Then there is the matter of the upcoming, or rather downgoing, generation of kids we no longer have the money to educate or medicate properly. They won’t be able to find jobs in the new job-starved economy, either. The answer is as simple as one and one makes two! On the one hand we have all these sexed-up kids with nothing better to do than to hook up when they’re barely out of elementary school. On the other hand we have the upper one percent of the population, which has……everything. It has the trillion dollar income tax cuts; it has gigantic landholdings which will only increase as estate taxes are done away with. It has plenty of free time because it can live off untaxed corporate dividends and golden parachutes and outrageous stock option packages. The answer? Draft the future-less public school youth into the Children’s Army. The Pope did it during the Crusades and W can do it again. Improve their self esteem by forcing them to serve their nation. Give them a chance to show off the only skill they have---their precocious sexual chops. Send the more attractive of the nation’s uneducated youthful conscripts to the estates of the rich, where they can work for room and board as sex slaves. The less attractive youth can clean up the messes left by the orgies. Voila! Problem solved! The youth of the nation will be gainfully employed at occupations which do not require formal educations. All the more attractive youth will need to know are basic sexual techniques. And the rich can give them home-schooling in advanced kama sutra and the like. The less attractive youth will have to find SOMEONE to show them how to use a mop and Lysol, but this training can be accomplished by the domestic staffs of the rich which are presently in-place. Once the outgoing butlers and maids and cooks and gardeners and chauffeurs have properly instructed the incoming domestic trainees, the old staff can be shipped out of the country, back to whatever Third World nation they originally hailed from. They won’t have any say in the matter. Once they become superfluous, their rich employers will feel free to “out” them for the illegal aliens they are. And the INS can do the rest. Those who protest their deportation will have to face John Ashcroft, who will immediately label them security risks and potential terrorists. And once they lose their jobs, that’s exactly what they will become unless they are promptly run out of America.

Also, the wild sexual antics of the rich gamboling with the youthful sex-conscripts can be captured on videotape and these tapes can be marketed at home and abroad, giving both our domestic economy and our balance of payments a boost.

Finally there is the vexed question of teachers. Public school teachers will become increasingly useless and unemployable as more and more youth drop out of school and serve the rich. What is to be done with them? Before these idle losers are tempted to take arms in a class war, let’s drive or herd them into the Teacher’s Reserve, where they will be warehoused in vast concentra….er…ah…reservations. There is no sense trying to train them to be combat decoys and to paint targets on their backs and send them to Iraq because teachers are likely to ask a lot of embarrassing questions about why they are in Iraq in the first place.

Instead, let them eat doughnuts and drink coffee and gossip and grade papers and fatten themselves up in feedlots cunningly designed to look like teachers’ lounges. Advance studies indicate that the average teacher left in a loungelike environment with an unlimited supply of Krispy Kreme doughnuts will put on ten pounds a week of handsomely marbled meat. After about six weeks, the teachers will be so doped up on sugar and fat that they will scarcely protest when they are led out of their feedlots and into killing pens where they can be neatly dispatched with electrified cattle prods applied to their bulging eggheads. Eliminating teachers will break the teachers’ unions, which are hotbeds of lefty politics and fundraising for Democrats.

The teachers’ carcasses can then be butchered and dressed and flashfrozen and exported to the far reaches of the protein-starved world, further improving America’s balance of payments. Their pale, sunstarved, hides, which are generally unstained by tattoos, can be tanned & weatherproofed and made into leather furnishings for mansions and sails for the yachts of the upper one percent. Teachers’ large, troubled, overstressed brains can be ground up and used as cattle feed, for there will continue to be those who prefer beef to sirloin of pedagogue. Suggestion: Make a lemonade out of a lemon by marketing pale, sunstarved teacher meat as “the OTHER other white meat.” Market analysts predict that it will rapidly pass ostrich meat and buffalo in the exotic meat market. Citizens should be encouraged to serve Teacher Rump on Thanksgiving as a mouthwatering alternative to turkey or ham.

With teachers gone, they will no longer have to be paid. This represents another big saving for national and state and local treasuries, so let’s begin a fresh round of taxcuts for the rich right now! Sure, teachers don’t get paid much, but there are a lot of them, so every one herded off and butchered is another penny saved. Moreover, the fewer teachers there are the fewer tough questions Americans will be taught to ask about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Saddam’s connection with bin Laden, the Bush Family’s connection with the bin Laden Family, the Bush Family’s connection with Enron, Dick Cheney’s energy policy, and…….well, I think you see what I mean.

The nation’s present budget problems are far from insuperable. All they require for solution is intellectual daring, audacious imagination, and political will. Citizens: Are you up to the challenge!?

--FIN--